Thursday, April 06, 2006

VIRTUAL ARTIS -TREE

Taking a detour from his genre of poetry,Swaranjit Savi now takes art-lovers through another sensuous journey. This time it’s the semi-real world of digital paintings.For those who think digital painting is simply playing with photographs on your PC, you gotta see it to know it. Savi explains, ‘‘Digital painting is closer to the art of painting than to photography.’’ It can best be described as the art of painting through technology, but cannot really be described aptly in words. A medium in-between the two, it’s a new form that has not yet caught up ’round here. One by one, Savi takes you through the 200 paintings which he has chosen out of almost 800 photographs.And where did this idea germinate from? ‘‘When I was writing my poems titled Dehinaad almost a decade back, I took pictures of trees in which I would see all kinds of human forms - from sensuality to meditation. Then, last year, when this idea of digital paintings hit me, I updated my earlier collection of pictures by taking new shots of trees around me. From places around Ludhiana, to Shimla, Dalhousie, Manali... wherever I went, for almost eight months, I was obsessed with trees. These, I converted into a whole series, through technological tools. In this series, one can see trees entwined with each other, trees crying out for help, trees celebrating nature and in various other forms.’’After a successful one-week exhibition at the Academy of Arts and Literature in Delhi last year, Savi has now put up his paintings for sale in the city. Though he is planning an exhibition here too, ‘‘but that will take some time.’’And coming from Savi, you know you cannot expect but the unconventional. A lover of human forms and vibrant colours, this man in his 40s is a publisher by profession and a painter, photographer and a controversial poet. The underlying current in all his art is celebration - brazen celebration of life, sexuality, even death. His paintings are splattered with un-common shades, his canvas is uncommonly big.For the record, he was the first publisher in Punjab to use technology in printing and his poetry ventured into avenues that Punjabi poets hadn’t dared tread (remember Kaameshwari and Ashram?). Not surprising then, that barring another artiste of this genre in Chandigarh, Savi is the only one in the region, definitely the first in Ludhiana. What kind of a price tag does he put on his works? Savi says the minimum cost is Rs 10,000. So for art-lovers who want to go beyond oils, or he purists who scorn at photography as an art, Savi’s digital paintings could prove to be just the kind of thing you were looking for.